


She asked me, son, when I grow old

by vexedcer



Series: we humans got a few things wrong [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Both steve and sarah are off screen the whole time, Grief/Mourning, Irish Sarah Rogers, Light Angst, Minor Character Death, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Pre-Slash, but not intensely sad? just sad, its sad :(, winifred-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-24
Updated: 2016-09-24
Packaged: 2018-08-17 01:20:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8125018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vexedcer/pseuds/vexedcer
Summary: Winifred knows, when Bucky doesn’t come home that night.And its not just because Bucky doesn’t come home; that just confirms it. She’s had a heavy dark feeling in her gut for the past week, listening to Bucky talk about the goings-on of the Rogers’ household when he had a late supper after the girls had gone to bed, and from when she stopped by with a loaf of bread under her arm.Call it mother’s intuition, call it a charlatan claim, call it whatever, but Winifred knows without question that Sarah Rogers has passed on.(Or: Winifred Barnes loved Sarah too.)





	

**Author's Note:**

> welp. here we are again. but truly and honestly, Mamas Rogers and Barnes are some of the most underappreciated characters. i would really love them to appear at some point in the MCU (but where they'd be idk)
> 
> ive also put this into a series but im almost sure this works as a standalone too. honestly, im not 100% happy w this one but whatever
> 
> anywho, the title is from house of gold by tøp, which seems to currently be a reoccurring theme of titling for my works. enjoy!!

Winifred knows, when Bucky doesn’t come home that night.

And its not  _ just  _ because Bucky doesn’t come home; that just confirms it. She’s had a heavy dark feeling in her gut for the past week, listening to Bucky talk about the goings-on of the Rogers’ household when he had a late supper after the girls had gone to bed, and from when she stopped by with a loaf of bread under her arm.

Call it mother’s intuition, call it a charlatan claim, call it whatever, but Winifred knows without question that Sarah Rogers has passed on.

She looks out into the darkness of the city, from the drafty kitchen window, and prays.

She remembers the first time she ever spoke to the woman, her whole body glowing with the pregnancy of the son she’s now left behind; she was big, bigger than she should have been since Steve was born so tiny, her eyes tired now but Winifred (“Winnie,” she told the woman as they sat, side by side, sowing seams, “Only my mama called me Winifred.”) knew that she was once a woman of much mischief, confirmed by the tales she told of her and her three brothers that had the easy-going ladies on their row in knots of laughter.

No one mentioned how the stories stopped at her being seventeen, when she told them that she’d arrived in the New World when she was twenty. Maybe it was the Irish lilt or it was the past tense she spoke of her brothers in.

The two of them would have gone dancing if they’d been younger girls, they would have brought their guys (who were now their husbands) out on double dates, gone to the salon together, had lunch. But they were far too old for those things when they met; Winifred had a bouncing baby boy and Sarah had one joining them soon.

And now their bouncing baby boys were big and strong in some ways, and not in others.

She doesn’t sleep, just sits at the heavy kitchen table and sifts through an old diary she kept when Bucky and Steve were still green to this world, looking at pictures she’d pressed into the pages, caught with George’s old camera from his youth.

Sarah looking thinner in the face, lovingly staring into the bundle of blankets that held her only child. She files it away into the pages and tells herself that she’ll give it to Steve when they next manage to force him around for dinner.

George has left for work, none the wiser the tragedy befallen the world they live in, before Bucky stumbles in wearing yesterday’s clothes, face pale.

She folds him into her arms when he cries, great heaving sobs muffled by her shoulder, watching as Rebecca comes to the door of the kitchen with an easy smile which morphs into alarm. She turns on her heel, and disappears down the hall again. Winifred can distantly hear the sound of her mumbling over Bucky’s choked noises, presumably to Alice as she diverts them into the cramped living room.

Bucky feels solid and strong and wide against her slender frame, but also fragile like Coney’s spun sugar, and she tries to forget that her son, nineteen with calloused hands from hard labour, the boy she can’t protect from the world’s cruel hands anymore, is tasting real grief for the first time.

Winifred hums an idle tune in her throat, rocking her son lightly back and forth in the otherwise quiet, empty room. Tears sting her eyes, because she’s never felt so hopeless to her child, and she knows there’s nothing she can really say to comfort Bucky, and because her friend has left this world behind her.

She gets soup into him, when he calms down, Rebecca and Alice moving about the kitchen making breakfast like the layer of misery and grief doesn’t sit heavy on them. (It does, she knows; she’s found that girls learn young how to hold in their pain, and be strong for the people around them. They’ll make good mothers, this way.)

“It was like - her lungs just didn’t wanna work anymore - gave up,” Bucky mumbles when his bowl is empty.

“TB is the worst of them,” Winifred says, looking out that same kitchen window she did last night. It looks the same as yesterday morning, all watery pale in the the early light. Like nothing’s changed, like the world hasn’t become that littlest bit darker.  _ Life goes on _ , she thinks bitterly.

“Some of the girls from her job are with Stevie right now,” he carries on. “Y’know Teresa Little? And Mary Mahony? Told me to go home, let you know.” He rubs his sleeve over his face to mop up tears and snot, and any other day she’d berate him for it, but now isn’t the time.

“How’s Steve?”

“Shocked, mostly. It hasn’t hit him yet.” He looks shocked himself, dreadfully drained with the only colour in his face is his red, puffy eyes and dark circles.

When Bucky leaves, towards lunchtime having showered and taken a nap, she forces a container of soup into his hand.

“You take care of him,” she tells him. She keeps his gaze for far longer than she needs to, pointedly telling Bucky without words that she knows. She sees how understanding forms in her son’s eyes and how terror takes over for a few seconds, before he gulps and looks down at his shoes. His face grows hard, filled with something like shame.

“Yeah - yeah, I will,” he tells his battered footwear.

She kisses his forehead, his ducked head only just allowing it - and when did her baby get so tall? - and whispers, _ I love you, _ into the quiet space between them on their stoop.

As she watches her son’s retreating back, she hopes Sarah knew how in love Bucky is with Steve, and that she knows now, in Heaven above, that Winifred loves Steve like her  own son.

(She does.)

**Author's Note:**

> thank u for reading!!


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